Nature and Gender in Alice Munro's Short Story 'Boys and Girls'

Seminar paper from the year 2024 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, http://www.uni-jena.de/ (English and American Studies), course: The Canadian Short Story, language: English, abstract: This paper examines Alice Munro's short story 'Boys and Girls' through the lens of ecofeminism. The theoretical part provides the key principles of ecofeminism as a literary theory, and in the analysis part their realisation in the story is explored. Ecofeminist literary criticism is a branch of literary criticism that, first of all, uses the principles of feminist literary criticism and ecocriticism - but is not restricted to them. Among other approaches with which ecofeminist literary criticism closely interact, there are 'radical environmental philosophy, critical animal studies, and radical economic and political theories about globalization, economics, ecology and politics' (Gaard 2010). Historically, ecofeminist literary criticism stems from ecofeminism as a movement with a two-decade history of activism and theoretical work. Ecofeminism, first of all, operates on the premise that in the male-dominated world both women and nature have long experienced discrimination. Hierarchical thinking in establishing relationships among humans brought about another form of inequality - towards nature. This defines the angle from which ecofeminist literary criticism approaches literary texts: the scholars seek to register two binary cross-connected oppositions 'male/female' and 'nature/culture' and expose a fallacious and dangerous character of this dualism.